In late March, we posted the new real-time caption pod extension for Adobe Connect 8 to the Adobe Exchange (you can find it here). Andrew Kirkpatrick, who looks after accessibility across Adobe, has a nice post on the subject on his team’s blog.
As part of my responsibility on our product management team, I worked with the external developer of the pod (they did a great job; more on them later) and wanted to share a few thoughts on the intent of the extension and, at a high level, how it can be used.
With the new Adobe Connect closed caption pod, real-time captioning of audio content can be easily integrated into meetings and events delivered via Adobe Connect. This extension ensures that participants who are deaf or hard of hearing can fully participate in online meetings and events.
The closed caption pod appears as a new pod to your Adobe Connect meeting environment. Meeting organizers hire professional captioning services from providers such as the Media Access Group at WGBH, Caption Colorado, and Caption First. Professional stenographers attend the Adobe Connect meeting or teleconference to listen to the audio and transcribe the information using specialized stenographer’s keyboards. This information is then transmitted to a captioning server.
The captions are transmitted to the Adobe Connect meeting and viewed by end users. Meeting participants have the ability to customize the caption font size and color settings to enhance readability. Participants can even skip back to re-read previous captions and then fast forward to the current captions. Participants can individually choose to display or not display captions on their individual screen. And participants can optionally save the captions as a transcript and download them at the conclusion of a meeting.
The extension is a great example of what can be done by any Flex developer using the Adobe Connect Collaboration Builder SDK available for free from the Adobe Developer Connection. Again, the developer of this pod, eSyncTraining, did a great job leveraging their Flex development expertise – adding robust new functionality to any Adobe Connect meeting to perfectly address a specific need.
If you haven’t, I encourage you to read more about and download the pod on the Adobe Exchange. And let us know your thoughts in comments or on Twitter @AdobeConnect.
Cheers,
Peter Ryce, Adobe Connect Evangelist